Keeping Fit All the Way eBook

capital P and Government with a capital G, even though
army and navy orders take precedence, there is one
great mistress of all, Dame Nature! And when she
taps a man on the shoulder and says, “Quit!”
that man stops; and when he offers the excuse that
he has done it out of patriotism and loyalty she merely
says: “I don’t care why you did it,
you have finished!” And there is no appeal to
Washington from her verdict.

THE BIG PROBLEM

We shall soon hear the call for more men, men to fight
and men to support the men who fight. The game
is on. We are all in it now, either on the field
or on the side-lines. We need to train for it
fast and we have no time to waste. For, after
all, it is condition that tells. It is the man
who can stay, who can work at highest efficiency, and
who can hold out the longest who is going to be most
valuable. If we save even ten minutes a day in
the setting-up exercises, we save, with a hundred
thousand men, 16,666 hours daily toward perfecting
their other knowledge. If we can make an able
officer or a competent executive last a year longer
or even six months under the increased strain, it gives
us a year or six months more in which his understudy
can gather the necessary experience to take up his
task.

Millions of our youth are going out to fight, but
disease and exhaustion will kill more of them than
will the guns of the enemy. Thousands of men
of the best brain-power in this country are going into
committee-rooms and conferences every day from nine
in the morning till twelve at night to devise better
and more efficacious means of stopping the progress
of the Hun. If these men’s brains are of
value, and we know they are, then the more clearly
they act and the longer they last, the better for the
country.

THE NEED FOR A CONDENSED SYSTEM OF CALISTHENICS

The demonstration, with a group of busy business executives
and professional men, of the possibility of physical
fitness at a small expenditure has been already mentioned.
This idea has spread and many units of the Senior
Service Corps have been organized. The writer’s
services were later on drafted into national work.
At the call of the Secretary of the Navy, he was asked
to take a position on the Naval Commission to develop
athletic sports and games and physical fitness in
our men at the various naval stations. In one
week alone requests came from over four hundred communities
to establish units of this work among business and
professional men. Finding that it was impossible
to answer all these calls, the writer devoted himself
personally to a class in Washington, consisting of
several Cabinet members, officials of the Federal
Reserve Board, and others, and these men profited extremely
from the work. But this should be done on a far
larger scale.